Put Your Customers'
Questions To Work
BY CLAUDIO PINKUS, JEEVES SOLUTIONS,
A DIVISION OF ASK JEEVES, INC.
Since the beginning of time, people have engaged in conversation
through questions and answers. This form of communication has naturally
transitioned into the way customers expect to interact with corporations.
Although companies have invested millions of dollars to dynamically
interact with customers via Web-based navigation, e-mail, toll-free
numbers, VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) and chat, these organizations
have lacked the tools, processes and discipline to leverage the knowledge
gained from these applications to listen, understand and respond to
customers' needs.
In an attempt to improve self-service and automate contact centers
through customer relationship management (CRM) applications, most
companies have viewed the question and answer process as simply a function
of sales (increase revenue) or customer support (lower costs). As
companies have been investing money in CRM, many have overlooked the value
that can be derived from analyzing the incoming question stream to gain
actionable insight that can improve overall business practices.
Companies regularly pay research firms tens of thousands of dollars to
conduct focus groups and surveys in order to capture customer data such as
who the customers are, what they want, how they make decisions and even
how they feel about a particular product or service. Yet, few companies
recognize that they are already sitting on a treasure trove of customer
data that enter the company every day through existing self-service
systems. When properly processed, customer data captured through
self-service can turn into a round-the-clock user focus group that can
help ensure customer loyalty, improve sales and increase retention.
Investing in the right customer interaction technology is the first
step, but not every point of interaction lends itself to easy and
effective analysis. For instance, if you want to analyze call center
transcripts, you'll find yourself struggling to aggregate the data into
groups and trends without going through mountains of paperwork. There are
three questions you can consider to ensure that you are getting the most
out of your customer interactions:
- 'Am I capturing the questions being asked by my customers?'
- 'Am I gaining actionable knowledge from interacting with my
customers?'
- 'Do I have an automated approach for processing the data gathered
in these interactions?'
If you answered 'no' to any of the above questions, you're not
using your customers' questions to their full potential. Customers are
your organization's biggest asset and listening to them pays off with
increased customer satisfaction and loyalty and decreased support costs.
Molding every aspect of your business around customer needs and input can
lead to the competitive advantage you've been looking for in today's
tough economy. To fully take advantage of customer questions, companies
must:
- Capture and aggregate incoming questions,
- Analyze customer data,
- Share customer data across the organization,
- Change business processes and products, and
- Proactively measure and solicit feedback.
Capture And Aggregate Incoming Questions
The best place to analyze customers' queries is by capturing them via
question-answering technologies such as e-mail, phone calls to support
centers, voice over IP (VoIP) and/or chat sessions. Once a business
discovers the value of its customers' questions, the next step is to
determine strategic objectives and select which technology can help
accomplish those objectives. Ask each of your customer-facing application
providers if they have an automated solution to capture and provide
detailed reports about customers' questions. An automated analytics
solution is necessary because no one has time to generate or read hundreds
of reports. If your provider is not automated, there are a handful of
companies that offer automated reporting and analysis tools for
aggregating information related to customer interactions. This will allow
the creation of high-level summaries that can identify if a business is
responding to customers' most important demands. Work with executive
management and your technology providers to identify the types of reports
in which you are interested. It's also important to evaluate how well
analytic and reporting products can integrate with other customer-facing
technology components. Customer analytic tools are less effective if they
can't be integrated into existing operational and collaborative CRM
component investments.
Analyze Customer Data
Taking a customer's question seriously can be an important competitive
advantage. In a recent survey, Jupiter MediaMetrix found that 70 percent
of experienced Web users would leave a site if they could not find the
information they need. Clearly, your company wants to answer a customer's
question, but it's equally important to analyze the questions to help
guide product and service offerings, marketing programs and sales efforts
with customer-driven information. When a company starts to understand the
nature of customers' questions, it gains a deeper insight into the their
needs, helping create new opportunities and establish long-term
relationships. Work with your team to identify the opportunities within
Web navigation, e-mail, call center, VoIP and chat technology where you
can leverage knowledge gained from your customers' questions. Designate
a data analysis team that can identify key areas where the company can
gain a deeper understanding of customers' behavior, including knowledge
about their concerns, interests and motivations. Areas for analysis should
focus on support, service and pre- and post-sales. Look for qualitative
and quantitative information about customers' buying habits, the level
of technical support they expect and the number of repeat support
questions coming into the contact center. Look for trends, content holes,
performance metrics, FAQs, timely questions surrounding a crisis or
questions following recent marketing and advertising campaigns.
Share Customer Data Across The Organization
Providing the type of service that encourages your customers to come back
and do business is essential to your company. While capturing questions is
often the easy part, the information derived from the questions is useless
if it remains disorganized or scattered over the enterprise. Knowledge
gained from customer questions must be shared across appropriate
departments and divisions so the right changes can be made to product,
sales, marketing and business strategies. In addition to needing an
automated solution to capture and aggregate incoming questions, it's
imperative to have an automated component to generating reports that can
be shared across the organization. Sharing data becomes easier if your
systems can be easily integrated or can leverage existing investments such
as content management systems.
Contact centers and Web sites are two large investments that can
leverage customer knowledge across departments to improve efficiencies.
CSRs (customer service representatives) often answer time-consuming
questions that can easily be answered on a Web site. CSRs should identify
these types of questions, report them to the Web development team or
integrate with content management systems applications to allow customers
to help themselves through self-service via the Web. The department
responsible for Web navigation technology can also study reports and
monitor questions asked via natural language to ensure that CSRs are kept
up to speed on support methods, products and processes. This can be used
as an effective way to train CSRs to deliver standard responses based on
real customer interactions
Sharing information can get very complex, particularly if ownership and
collaboration processes are not well defined. Business intelligence and
information distribution applications can help maximize the use of this
vital information by making customer data easily accessible in real-time
via an Extranet or Intranet. E-mail can also be an effective tool for
information sharing if it is well integrated into a cohesive process.
Change Business Processes And Products
The cost of gaining a new customer can be 7 to 10 times higher than
retaining an existing satisfied customer, so it's extremely important to
fine-tune business strategies to retain customers and beat competitors.
Armed with the information derived from listening to your customers'
questions, take the necessary steps to change your business processes. You
may be surprised by the efficiencies gained as you optimize existing
technology and service investments. Look for areas that can help improve
your bottom line, like recognizing the demand for a new high-margin
service. Use the questions to proactively monitor a demand for a new
product that can expand your market share and make the necessary
adjustments to drive the business opportunity. Evaluate customer data to
forecast your hottest selling item during the December holidays and make
sure you have the inventory throughout the holiday season.
If a company receives consistent customer communication via a toll-free
support telephone number inquiring about the warranty on a new purchase,
learn from the interaction and update your Web site content to address the
question for other customers. In this situation, reviewing your customers'
questions and developing content to effectively provide an answer via the
Web through self-service could save $10 per e-mail interaction. As a next
step to further changing your business process, analyze additional
customer questions surrounding warranty inquiries and determine if there
is an opportunity to seamlessly escalate the customer to other
communications channels (possibly to upsell an extended warranty).
In addition, if you are receiving hundreds of support questions about a
new product that just shipped, touch base with product development to
proactively identify and solve a potential problem. Marketing can also
gain tremendous knowledge surrounding questions about a new advertising
campaign. As a result of sharing information and making changes to your
business, you can effectively enhance sales and marketing efforts while
reducing support costs.
Proactively Ask For Feedback
Another way to put your customers' questions to work is to solicit
feedback immediately following their question-and-answer session. For
example, you could consider implementing a pop-up screen that is generated
after a customer has asked a question via the Web. This could include
asking a simple question like 'Was your question answered?' or 'Was
this interaction helpful?' If the customer did not receive an answer to
his or her question, consider escalating the customer to other
communication channels. This will allow you to satisfy the customer, while
also gathering intelligence to answer the next customer who poses the same
question. In addition, if a customer did not find an answer, consider
asking him or her questions that will help enhance your business. Find out
what prompted the customer to send an e-mail versus picking up the phone
or versus searching for the answer on your Web site. If the customer
started on your Web site and could not find the answer, determine why and
make the necessary adjustments to promote self-service. Being proactive as
opposed to reactive will allow you to assess the real impact of your
customer interaction efforts. This will help prioritize future projects
and improve customer relations.
Don't let your customers' voices go unheard. Any company that uses
a Web site or a contact center to satisfy customer queries can easily
learn from its customers' questions. Take advantage of this valuable
method of interaction and learn from each question to make the necessary
adjustments to your business. Listening to customers is not merely about
discovering their buying patterns and getting them to make big purchases;
it's about building long-term relationships and loyalty. In this
economy, companies will beat the competition if they are able to respond
quickly to changing customer demands. Putting your customers' questions
to work will not only give you the actionable insight to improve customer
retention, increase sales, deliver better products and improve overall
product and marketing efforts, it will also allow you to stay one step
ahead of the competition.
Claudio Pinkus is president of Jeeves Solutions, a division of Ask
Jeeves, Inc.
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